The Many Encounters with a Girl Named Priya

t-minus fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes.

I’d seen the girl before. One could go as far as describing me as a regular observer of her life – not in a creepy way though. She sat across from me on the subway this morning and it made me painfully aware of how I’d almost missed the train. She was always immaculately put together; I hadn’t had time to find matching socks. She had expensive Airpod Maxes in seafoam green which didn’t make her head look like a marshmallow sandwich. I tugged at the wire of my earbuds and twisted it tighter into my phone socket – they only worked when they were positioned at a very particular angle. Our morning commutes always collided but that was about the only thing in our lives that seemed to be similar.

Her name was Priya, I’d strained by eyes at the drivers license in the back of her phone case one day until I made it out. I couldn’t do that today however, it was only habitual that I recognised her at all, my box of contacts lay crumpled on the floor where I’d knocked it off last night. I leaned back awkwardly against the seat and tried not to stare at her, she definitely was not staring at me. She was engaged in her book, ‘Kafka on the Shore’, I hadn’t read it but I was sure it was intellectual in some way. No, Priya was not squinting at random girls’ drivers’ licenses. For one, I didn’t actually have a driver’s licence – I couldn’t drive. Train girl, Priya, stood up to disembark as her station rolled across the neon announcement signs hanging from the compartment ceilings. She didn’t lose her balance as the subway jolted to a stop, of course she didn’t.  

The line ran past my stop next and I grabbed my bag off the seat next to me, my sunglasses fell off where I’d precariously hooked a leg over the edge of the tote and clattered down to carriage floor. I bent down to pick them and the train jolted to a halt again causing me to tumble forward onto my hands and knees. I retrieved my sunglasses sheepishly and jumped through the closing doors onto the platform. On the way out of the station I headed on my normal route towards a coffee stand that sat conveniently between the two subway platforms. I was in a hurry but I could generally grab one on my way past. Just as I’d hoped there was already a cup sitting on the edge of the stand and I picked it up as I rushed by, dropping a handful of coins into the jar beside the cup - keep the change. I’d got to almost the other side of the station before I saw the name scribbled on the side of the paper cup: Margret. RIP Margret.  

As I walked back up the stairs towards the pavement and streets outside I tried to channel myself into a better mood. The familiar notes of a song I loved came on and I walked to its beat, the sun was shining down on me and I began to feel better. Then my headphone jack shifted half a millimetre and my tunes disconnected.

t-minus ten hours and thirty minutes.

I had finished Margret’s coffee several hours ago and it was beginning to wear off. My colleague often said that as we worked in a coffee shop we could probably get our caffeine fix through simply smelling it all day. Personally second-hand smoking didn’t get me high and second-hand caffeine did nothing for me but make my hair smell of coffee. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my job, on the contrary I did enjoy it mostly, it was just the end of a mildly tedious week, and I was excited to get to the weekend. Starbucks has a bad reputation for its employees being incompetent students and or unable to spell. I was probably entirely responsible for the latter.

‘It’s Aaron’ a customer had said slightly amused earlier as I handed them their coffee. I looked down at what I’d scrawled on there in black sharpie: Iron.

‘Ah, sorry,’ I shrugged and laughed it off.

Sometimes as I burned myself for the umpteenth time that month or spilt milk on the counter – which I did not cry over – I would watch the other girls my age in the café. A cup of Starbucks latte makes you look a least thirty percent more put together than without one. They would sit there with their laptops and their digital pencils with their caramel frappuccinos or foamy iced mochas and gloat so openly to the world around them that they had neither a care in the world nor a lack of social life. I had many cares in the world, such as who has the cash to spend almost five pounds on a coffee. The freezer at our particular joint liked to trip for the fun of it sometimes and that’s just what happened as I reached the scoop in for some cubes and brought up nothing but water.

‘Look I’m really sorry.’ I turned to the customer who had just walked up to the counter, ‘but we can’t do anything iced right now.’

‘Oh that’s okay, I was going to have an oat milk latte anyway.’

It was the first time I’d heard her speak but somehow without fully registering her I knew it was Priya.

‘Ah, well, okay sure no problems then.’ I turned away to make the drink and wondered if she recognised me. She had nice manners, the sort that made her put her headphones around her neck when ordering as opposed to keeping them on. Perhaps that was scraping the bottom of the barrel a little bit. I glanced a little over my shoulder but she was browsing the small bakery treats we had displayed inside the cabinet next to the till. No, I decided, she didn’t recognise me.

‘Here’s your drink,’ I said after a moment handing it across the counter. ‘A bit warm for a latte today, isn’t it?’ I wasn’t entirely sure what had possessed me to attempt to make conversation.

She laughed and took the cup, ‘actually I work somewhere pretty cold so this is nice.’ She smiled at me (she had a flawless smile) and left the shop with a tinkle of the bell.

I stood for a moment processing this change in our routine, I had never seen her at my work before only on the train. This twist from once a day to twice had thrown me in a loop. I glanced down at my watch and then out at the warm air separated tantalisingly from me by a thin pain of glass and a glazed on logo.

Only two more hours then I was free.

t-minus seven hours and fifty-seven minutes.

Killing time had always been easy for me. I could hyper-actively daydream my way through hours for starters and for seconds, ice cream. On my way between the coffee shop I worked at and the ice cream parlour across the road I paid enough attention to spot the bright red sign hanging in its window ‘closed,’ damnit. I plucked my phone out my back pocket careful not to drop it against the curb and add to the plethora of cracks already littering the screen and typed in ‘ice cream parlours near me’ to google maps. From a moments quick research I found one only a couple of streets away that I hadn’t been to before and headed off in the vague direction of my desired dark chocolate cherry gelato. There’s something rare and beautiful about walking alone pavements which, if one stripped off their shoes and socks, would be warm to the touch. Add a brightly lit sky and a playlist out of an indie movie and you have yourself the recipe for a good walk. En route I paused to browse in a bookshop window. Sitting up in the prime centre spot of the display was ‘Kafka on the Shore’ – serendipity. I debated it for a moment but I never deprived myself a little treat, especially after work. I headed inside the store and a few minutes later re-emerged with a crinkly brown paper bag and a bonus bookmark.

I looked around to orientate myself against the street names surrounding me and spotted the ice cream parlour across the street. One short dash across a road and a little jingly bell was all that stood between me and the blessed cool of a cherry scoop. As I reached the counter, I scanned the flavours and confirmed to my delight that not only was my flavour of choice there, but it was also untouched for the day. I gained a strange sense of satisfaction and pride that my scoop would be the first of the day.

‘Can I have a dark cherry chocolate please?’ I said brightly to the girl behind the counter who looked up from her till. Her hijab matched her apron. Three times in one day Priya and I came face to face, except this time we were on reversed sides of the counter.

‘Of course,’ she had the same perfect smile that she had when she ordered her latte.

I wondered if she recognised me but the smile seemed to indicate she did and I smiled back brightly. She handed me my cup and my scoops and I took a seat outside making sure she could see me before I took out my copy of ‘Kafka on the Shore’ and propping it open against my ice cream. If she saw me reading it perhaps she would consider me intellectual enough to start a real conversation with. I took another look at her and wondered how she kept every fold of cloth in place like it had been ironed on her. I turned a little further and a hairclip fell out of my hair into my ice cream with a sad plop. I plucked it out and licked the ice cream off of it before putting it back in my hair. Priya wouldn’t be sucking chocolate off of her hairclips.

I sat in the sun, licking my spoon every now and then and getting the occasional chocolatey fingerprint on the edge of the book. I was so engaged in fact that I only looked up when my phone alarm started to go off on the metal chair next to me vibrating embarrassingly loudly.

‘CONCERT TIME!!!!!’

I dug into my back and plucked out the ticket I had carefully pressed between my keys, my chapstick, and a wad of receipts from various cheap sandwiches for safe keeping. [1 entry - Sabrina Carpenter 15/07]

Just like that my shift and my time killing was worth it, the main event of my day was upon.

t-minus two hours and forty-eight minutes.

Concerts are the most all-consuming places in the world, especially small venues. Everyone around me had the same electric buzz to them, singing, dancing and jumping around. I was drinking but I still felt inebriated by the shear energy coming off of my surroundings. My lungs were raw and my vocal chords spent thirty minutes in but I didn’t really care. Occasionally I have out of body experiences, the world around me seems to slow and I realise that this moment is temporary and that the only way to not be filled with regret is to live it so intensely that I cannot miss anything. The red neon glowing hearts on the stage and the sound of the band were a sensory overload and scratched an itch in my brain simultaneously.

A girl waved me over from a couple of paces away and leaned down to scream in my ear. ‘DO YOU WANT A FRIENDSHIP BRACELET?!’

Her wrists were full of them and she had a pair of red heart shaped sunglasses nearly flying off her head and a wine stain down the right leg of her trousers.

‘HELL YES PLEASE!’ I yelled back trying to make myself heard over the speakers resounding all around us.

She handed me a bracelet off her arm and leaned back down to me ‘I LOVE YOUR HAIR! IT LOOKS AWESOME!’

‘THANK YOU! I LOVE YOUR GLASSES!’

‘THANKS! SEE YOU LATER YEA?’ She waved at me as she disappeared into the crowd nearly tripping over the edge of the stage barrier.

I looked down at my friendship bracelet and put it on my wrist grinning. The tragedy act of concerts was that when someone says see you soon they really mean see you never. Good luck finding your way back through that crowd ever again. It was as I stood looking at the crowd for a moment that I saw her dancing off to the side as to not be caught up in the chaos of the centre floor, Priya. I was always filled with a kind of wild confidence when the atmosphere was like this. I fought my way over to her through the crowd and finally made it into a gap where I could walk to her easier.

‘HEY!’ I leaned over and used the final croak of my vocal chords to shout to her. ‘I LIKE YOUR CARDIGAN YOU LOOK GREAT!’

She turned to look at me and smiled again in what seemed to be recognition. ‘OH THANKS!’ She somehow didn’t have to shout as loud as I felt I needed to to be heard. I glanced around trying to find something to say to her.

‘DO YOU WANT A FRIENDSHIP BRACELET?!’ I took it off my wrist and held it out to her.

‘SURE,’ she took it and smiled once more. ‘I’M GOING TO GO GET SOME WATER.’

She vanished off up the aisle side of the theatre towards the bar at the back. I could’ve punched the air, finally I had found an excuse to say something more than excuse me or hey and even better than that the concert tragedy curse couldn’t apply to us as I knew we would get the same train home. I could feel the budding friendship blooming as I turned back to dancing this time in celebration as well as to the music.

t-minus zero hours, zero minutes.

Several hours later I sat on a bench on the platform for the last train home. I kicked my shoes together with soft thunks, my hearing still returning to normal with that post concert static filling the white noise cravings in my brain. The little neon hanging sign announced to me and the empty platform that the train was due. Right on time as always I heard the tapping of Priya approaching quickly. She didn’t acknowledge me as she stood on the platform a couple of paces to my right checking her watch against the time on the station clock.

‘Hi again,’ I said to break the silence.

She glanced up at me produced her classic smile, ‘hello.’

‘So did you enjoy it? I thought the set choice was amazing right!’

She looked at me and for the first time that smile drifted out of place. ‘Uhm, sorry I don’t know what you’re talking about?’

‘The Sabrina concert?’ I began to question if those smiles had been looks of familiarity at all.

‘Oh, you were there? Ye it was really fun.’ The smile resurrected itself.

‘Ye I was the one who gave you the friendship bracelet about half way through.’ I went to gesture at the little woven band I’d handed over but it was nowhere to be seen on her arms.

‘A friendship bracelet? I must have lost it somewhere.’ She shrugged and laughed, ‘ah well, do you get the train this way much?’

I looked at her in consternation, was she really that unobservant, or vice versa was I truly that obsessive? ‘Uhm, yes everyday actually. I take the same train into town too.’

‘Oh,’ she looked both unconcerned and empty of realisation. ‘Funny we never ran into each other before.’

I opened my mouth to correct her rather vehemently and then closed it again. She clearly did not have any clue about serendipitous encounters we’d been having all day nor had she ever noticed me before.

‘Chance encounters are what keep us going,’ I quoted, remembering the line that had stuck out to me whilst in the sun with my cherry gelato. She furrowed her brow in confusion.

‘From Kafka on the Shore, I was reading it earlier,’ I explained awkwardly.

‘Never read it,’ she said with a shrug that left me baffled and all out of things to say.

‘I’m Priyanka,’ she held out her hand. ‘Maybe I’ll run into you again?’

She must have had her pinkie over the end of her name. The parasociality of my day washed over me all at once.

‘I’m Frankie’ I said. I didn’t take her hand.          

It occurred to me that for all the similarities I’d studied I had no proof that we hummed the same music, read the same page, or even smelled the same scent from an unassuming latte.

We got on the train as it pulled in and for the first time ever (unbeknownst to Priya) we sat in different carriages. Imagination, I realised, was occasionally unhelpful. On the other hand at least I felt less pressure on the lack of coordination between my hairgrips and my apron.

The last thing I did before my phone died was pull up the subway map to find another line that took me to my stop.